The present disclosure relates to autonomous control of vehicles.
Space available along a curb is often limited for parallel parking, especially in busy urban areas. This limited curb space is often used inefficiently due to different vehicle lengths as well as asynchronous arrivals and departures of the vehicles. For example, a small compact car may claim a parking spot previously occupied by a big truck, thus creating a relatively large distance between the compact car and its proximate vehicle. This individual distance may be insufficient for another vehicle to park, while the aggregation of multiple intervals between parked vehicles may be sufficient to accommodate one or even more additional vehicles.
An existing solution for addressing parallel parking space underutilization is to demarcate curb space with painted borders or parking meters for each individual parking spot. However, this existing approach generally requires the area designated for each parking spot to be adequate to accommodate vehicles of different sizes and also include a buffer space needed for the vehicles to maneuver in and out. As the parking spots are established in advance, this existing solution is inflexible and inefficient because it is incapable of allocating parking spaces according to vehicle size and specific parking situation in a dynamic manner.
Another existing solution is to implement an automated parking system. However, the automated parking system is generally designed for a specific structure of a particular parking lot and often requires implementation of new infrastructures. As a result, this approach is inflexible and expensive. In addition, the automated parking system generally requires the parked vehicles to be able to communicate with a centralized control unit to be aware of the vehicles' positions and to control the vehicles' relocation. Therefore, it is impossible for the automated parking system to operate when one or more parked vehicles are not provided with this ability, and thus are not responsive to the control of the centralized control unit. Furthermore, the automated parking system generally cannot adapt its operation to presence of random objects (e.g., pedestrians or trashcans) in the surrounding environment. Thus, these objects are not allowed in the parking lot when the automated parking system is in operation.